“The $50 billion IT services and software procurement known as CIO-SP4 reached new lows on July 19 with the National Institutes of Health IT Acquisition and Assessment Center (NITAAC) release of amendment seven.
Not only did the changes throw bidders into a new frenzy, but continued modifications to the rules to the small business teaming arrangements is putting the entire procurement at risk of collapsing under its own futility.
To understand just how problematic the changes brought on by amendment seven are, let’s look at a company, I’ll call Technology Company X (TCX). The real company agreed to share its story under condition of anonymity because it still plans to bid on the program and didn’t want to impact its relationship with NITAAC…”
“At the heart of the issue are changes in amendment seven that no longer lets small firms claim the experience of its large business subcontractors for points as part of the self-scoring evaluation…”
“When NITAAC released amendment seven and removed the ability of small firms to claim points from large business subcontractors, TCX’s self-score dropped to about 5,000.
‘There was a clear implication from NITAAC that if you’re not over 9,000 points, you will not make the cut. It’s unclear where the cut is, so you’d be stupid not to compose your team of large and small contractors to maximize your points,’ Pat said. ‘After amendment seven, our initial reaction was we are not sure we will make the cut. So we are now beating the bushes for small businesses who we can add to our team to get us back up to where we think the cut is going to be. The problem is we will wind up with a large unwieldy team if we have to add another 6 to 8 small businesses. Managing a team like that is another evaluation criteria, so we will also have to change our entire management approach. How do we make sure all the team members have reasonable access to task orders while making certain that we do 51% of all work?’…” Read the full article here.
Source: The story of how one small business is barely hanging on to its hopes of winning a spot on NITAAC’s CIO-SP4 – By Jason Miller, July 23, 2021. Federal News Network.
